Students who made anti-Semitic remarks barred from graduation ceremonies

Three 8-grade students from Ogden International School will be missing their graduation after making anti-Semitic remarks to another student.

Three 8-grade students from Ogden International School will be missing their graduation after making anti-Semitic remarks to another student.

Kim Geiger and Noreen S. Ahmed-UllahTribune reporters

After repeated demands that anti-Semitic remarks by Ogden International School students against a fellow eighth-grader be labeled a hate crime, a Chicago Public Schools official stopped short of characterizing the behavior that way but said the three boys would not be allowed to participate in graduation ceremonies.

Chicago Board of Education Vice President Jesse Ruiz said at a local school council meeting Thursday that an investigation into the events at Ogden “has determined that the boys’ behavior targeted a group that historically has been subjected to discrimination and persecution.”

The additional punishment meted out against the Ogden students comes after some parents, including the victim's mother, Lisa Wolf Clemente, demanded that the boys be punished more severely. She said her son was told, “You should wear striped pajamas. We're going to put you in an oven.” She added that the students showed him pictures of concentration camps and said, “This is what’s going to happen to you.”

According to CPS, Clemente contacted school principal Joshua Vander Jagt on May 20 to let him know her son also had been subjected to anti-Semitic comments from classmates and that students had been playing a video game that “had been altered to include offensive language.”

The students behind the bullying wrote apologies to the victim, district officials said. The students had all been learning about the Holocaust in their eighth grade curriculum, and the class has since visited the Holocaust museum in Skokie.

All three of the students have received one-day out-of-school suspensions, and two of them have also received an additional day of in-school suspension.

Ruiz said the incidents at Ogden would guide districtwide revisions to the student code of conduct. Right now, bullying incidents land students one- to three-day suspensions.

Additionally, the district will bolster anti-bullying training and will work with nonprofits and leading community organizations, Ruiz said.

Clemente said after Ruiz's statement that she didn't “want to split hairs” over how the behavior was described.

“It's not about my son,” Clemente said. “What I'm really upset about is the way it was handled.”

She focused her criticism on Vander Jagt.

Among her complaints about Vander Jagt’s handling of the situation, Clemente said, after she reported the bullying, he had promised to meet her son one morning before school and then didn’t show up.

“She's absolutely right,” Vander Jagt said at the meeting. “I told her that I would meet with her son the next morning. And I didn't.”

Vander Jagt, who has been Ogden’s principal for about six months, said he thought he would be able to make it to the other campus in time to meet Clemente’s son at lunch time after tending to another responsibility, but was unable to do so.

Vander Jagt said he had “made mistakes” but that he took the allegations of anti-Semitic bullying very seriously.